Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a heat-insulating housing having at least one useful housing space which is enclosed by housing walls and at least one door. The invention also relates to a household oven and a household refrigerator having a chamber with the housing.
Thermal insulation is achieved in various ways in the known prior art. In the field of household appliances, for instance, such as refrigerating appliances, ovens or the like, various insulating materials are used to insulate useful spaces. In ovens, an oven chamber that surrounds a baking space is provided with fibrous insulating materials on its outside which serves the purpose of thermal insulation, and in refrigerating appliances high-resistance foams are used for thermal insulation. The high-resistance foams are introduced in the form of liquid starting components between an outer metal housing and an inner plastic lining for joining the two together after a chemical reaction has taken place. Vacuum insulating panels are also used instead of the high-resistance foam insulation for purposes of insulation in the field of refrigerating appliances. The vacuum insulating panels are introduced into an interstice between the outer metal housing and the inner plastic lining. In that case, transitions between the individual wall portions of the heat-insulating housing of a refrigerating appliance are also filled with high-resistance plastic foam. As far as refrigerating appliances are concerned, the thermal insulation techniques which were used heretofore in the field of household appliances are disadvantageous especially in the event of recycling of the appliances, which is gaining increasing importance, since the various materials forming the heat-insulating housing are joined together into a unit by the high-resistance foam insulation, and separating the unit into its individual materials entails complicated and expensive separating processes, because of the adhesion action of the liquid foam. With regard to fibrous thermal insulating materials used in household ovens, such materials, because of their fibrous nature, are time-consuming to install in the oven chamber to be insulated and moreover involve the risk of individual fibers becoming dissolved out of the fibrous composition of the insulating material and becoming deposited at contact points of electrical function units, where they may cause problems regarding oven function because of their insulating nature.